Category Archives: online store

I won’t be hiding this emails address since I think people should know about this. There are two things to know about receiving scam emails from people trying to impersonate a well known organization like Amazon. Official Amazon email address despite the country, for an order confirmation and bogus email address. ALWAYS read the email address NOT the sender name!!

auto-confirm@amazon.com
REAL email address. Sender name will be auto-confirm@amazon.com with an email title: Your Order with Amazon.com

auto-confirm1116@amazon.co.uk
anything with a number after auto-confirm or letters is a scammer. Anything that says amazon@gmail.com or hotmail, is a scammer. Anything that sounds official but ends in @yahoo.com is a scammer trying to impersonate amazon. So be very careful and never reply!

Next thing to look out for in this bogus email is a zip file. In this zip file is an exe file. DO NOT RUN THIS! No exceptions! It will be called something like Order Information, Recipt or something stupid like that. This is a program. NO shop will ever send you order information in the form of a program. It is most likely a virus or worm with the intent to gain your personal information or destroy your PC. DO NOT run it! All of Amazons order information should be in your email appearing like this below and if Amazon does send you an attachment it will be a safe PDF of document file. Never an executable file (exe)!

So, your proper Amazon confirmation order (if you even ordered anything at all) should look something like this. I’ve blurred my personal details. Further down this email is details and information on what I ordered, when I ordered but I couldn’t screen cap all of the Amazon email:

Not like this!

Notice a few major differences in the fake email.

No official logo.

No addressing you by your first or full name that is registered with Amazon.

No receipt.

No order details except for a fake item number.

No mention of the shipping method.

No information on the order you supposedly ordered.

No estimated delivery time.

No information about the store on amazon you bought from eg. Sold by: __________

Not as many strong uses of paragraphs like an actual Amazon order would have on order details.

No coupons or deals on offer.

No amount spent.

No mention of your address like in the official Amazon email receipt.

No links on where to change your order details. Unlike the official Amazon email.

An attached file. Amazon doesn’t seem to attach files any more, probably due to this very issue.

No information about not replying to this email. Real Amazon auto-confirm generally has a little disclaimer about not replying as no one will read it because it is fully automated and the inbox is not checked.

No view cart, wishlist, order or help links.

Different font

Partial colour scheme to an Amazon order.

As you can see, there is quite a difference between a real email from Amazon and a fake one from either a scammer or some douche bag sending out viruses to random people on the net. More than likely it’s a virus to obtain personal information though I am not about to run it and find out. I will however after this post, be reporting it directly to Amazon.

If you get these emails, mark it as a phising scam. Do not reply. Do not reply because then they will also know that their email has been sent to a real person and they may try to persuade you to giving personal information. It is sometimes known as a confidence trick. They may even threaten you with legal action in a vain attempt to impersonate someone official. Legal action they may try to bring up would be debt collection. But they can’t do anything since what they are doing is illegal. The next step you can take is to then report the fake scammer email to Amazon.com and let them know about the issue.

Not all scammers are this lazy though. Some will take an order receipt and try to photoshop it to look offical but their email is what gives them away each and every time. This trick is often used with Paypal and unfortunately people fall for it. So in future if it feels suspicious, it probably is and always. always, always, read the full email link and compare to the original.

So I’m back to feeling well again and I re-opened my storenvy. I’m going to go back to featuring stores from Storenvy.com because there’s so much talent on there I’d just love to share! Click the images to visit the stores.

First one is Minabea Jewellery:

There ends this week’s Storenvy Features! Like I said, lots of talent and great products! Check them out, or give them some feedback! I think the best part is that they are all friendly. Nothing makes me happier than to be around lovely well mannered sellers. If you’re like me, you’re sick of places like ebay where manners aren’t the number one priority. These sellers and many others on Storenvy are great!

Go check out these wonderful people and their stores! The best part about storenvy is that you can follow the shops and the owners much like twitter. Very handy, especially if you’re a shop-a-holic like meh 😉

Their communication was excellent! Very positive and friendly, they waited with me to help me activate my product and it turns out it activated straight away anyway. The person was very kind and communicated through skype. It was the most pleasant and best shopping experience I have had online yet! Definitely worth checking out, amazing prices and great software!

In a few days I am going to start a new blog for my new zazzle store. Here is the link but it will take 24hrs or more for new items to appear. Sign up to keep up to date or notified when new stuff is added.

A number of friends have asked if I am going to sell my journals or if I will turn it into a serious business adventure and sell them regularly. I am very on the fence about selling them for a number of reasons. The main one is the competition and being handmade and my first time, I have yet to learn a good way of trimming and the finer points of book binding plus, my art is not only not very popular and an acquired taste in most cases. I’m not very design savy or up to date with what’s hot and what’s not as far as designs and cover art goes. I am more artwork orientated rather than design and knowing how to place things.

If I were to consider it I would use Etsy over ebay. The listing costs a fraction of that of ebay and I feel much safer there as both a seller and a buyer. So many on there are so professional in every aspect as well as kind. The overall environment is very friendly and user friendly. And there really are the best of the best handmade items on Etsy and their alchemy feature, wow, just wow. I love the alchemy feature where you can ask for something custom made. I use to use my etsy to sell prints and paintings and other things I’ve made like bookmarks when I was into making things. But it’s hard. It’s very, very, very hard to sell anywhere and to get a client base which usually starts with people you know. And it takes a lot of commitment. You have to do a lot of advertising. This isn’t a bad thing, many have made a great living from it. But you have to see why I am put off from selling my journals.

I don’t have that kind of time to put into advertising and I don’t know lots of people and I don’t have much family, and getting my name out there to people has proven to be near impossible over the years which is very disheartening to anyone that might consider selling anything, and I especially don’t have the money to do it. But if I were to consider it, I would offer the alchemy option because we all like different types of journals with different grades of paper and finding the right one for you is almost impossible! I personally hate to go journal shopping. I love journals a lot, don’t get me wrong there. I’ve found two in my life, and I spent $25 on both and they are so good I am scared to write in them because of the fear of running out of pages and loosing that joy to write and have to attempt to find another like it. So I made some for myself. But some people have taken a liking to them and want the one they saw. I would hate to deny them so if they ask of course I would make it and send them one.

The types of journals I want and like don’t even exist where I live and if they did they’d be expensive. I’m even considering putting together my own art journals now. I liked the books I use to get in primary school where one page was lined the other was blank and so on and so forth. I love super thick pages in my art books because I never know when I will suddenly decide to use my watercolours on it or break out the calligraphy kit and start inking traditionally. I’m very spontaneous as a writer and even worse as an artist. I’ve been dead asleep before and leapt out of bed to write. I have a book next to me while I sleep just in case I should ever have the need to do that again but I always seem to have the wrong book available which is why I like the convenience of the one lined one blank system.

I also like to make books to handwrite manuscripts and storyboarding. I prefer to keep mine together and have it tabbed. I’ve tried others ways and the amount of fraying that happened was beyond a joke. I told a few people this and they said I should sell those but it’s simply not that easy or simple. I’ve found the 90% of the time, most people buy journals from the design a lone or the design is the main focus. I’m guilty of this myself and later I regret it because the paper is usually so very poor in quality. I’ve since then learned to feel the paper and I actually know what kinds of texture to go for and even just from feeling the thickness I can tell if it’s right for me or not.

Another factor that I thought of when making these journals and whether or not to sell them was pens. I LOVE to write in felt tipped pens and draw with them. I prefer real ink pens as opposed to biro ink or gels. I HATE gel pens with a passion because of the number of times I swore it was dry but it smeared across the page. I am so fussy about having a clean page that this really grates on my nerves. I thought about the possibilities in making a journal with thick yet absorbent paper. What stopped me? The cost of said paper. Funnily enough I found a bundle of card stock that I forgot about and I made a journal from that and it suits me perfectly. It’s thick, good to go over with watercolours and easy to print on if I want lines. Cover art prints out ok. Not amazingly as the digital version but still pretty good. And then that tiny negative voice speaks up and plants seeds of doubt everywhere. It’s that doubt that holds me back from selling or giving it a go. So this is where I stand. I have ideas but am to frightened to take the step and take a chance.

I even had an idea for a watercolour diary/journal unlike others. For documenting purposes and learning or remembering techniques. I’d make it landscape sized, half of it on the one page would have boxes and space to write and the other blank. The boxes for colours you definitely want to use again and space to write down what you did to get that colour and extra space for annotations. But the question of whether or not others would find it as useful, still remains. This is the question that always holds me back from selling anything.